


Dirt and Blood

by dracoqueen22



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Campaign 2 (Critical Role), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-02
Updated: 2019-06-02
Packaged: 2020-04-06 14:13:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19064308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dracoqueen22/pseuds/dracoqueen22
Summary: Molly wakes with dirt on his tongue, and sleeps with blood on his lips.





	Dirt and Blood

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for a Mollymauk Tealeaf fanzine project which met with some hurdles and fell a little through. You can still download the pdf for free by going here: https://gumroad.com/l/dHKIg
> 
> The challenge was to write something as tribute for Molly that didn't include any licensed/trademarked names in the text. Feedback would be most welcome. Thank you for reading!

He likes beer and sweets and meat and bread and food and drink.   
  
A certain taste lingers in his mouth, no matter what he drinks or eats or who he kisses. He can’t be rid of it.   
  
He wakes with the flavor of dirt on his tongue. Dirt and silt and soil. The gritty harshness of plant matter and river rock. The reek of decaying organic life. The cloying sweetness of clay. He licks his lips and swears the grit of dirt follows the curve of his mouth, loiters in his nostrils, cakes in his hair no matter how much he shakes it out.   
  
He goes to sleep with blood on his lips, on his tongue, bitter and copper. It’s in his nose and at the back of his throat. It’s sticky and cloying and taints his dreams with a red haze.   
  
He tries to chase it away with other things.   
  
Expensive incense and fine paper and magical ink. Bubblegum sweets and cinnamon pastries. Ash and booze and stolen blackpowder. Sea-salt brine and the tang of borrowed magic. Leather and mint and bacon-grease. Sweet flowers and prairie wind and sword polish.   
  
He buries himself in the familiar, in the scents of his family found, but when he lays down for the night, blood coats his tongue and chokes his throat, and no amount of bathing washes him clean. Not lavender oils or sandalwood soaps. Not the press of sweat-slick skin, or the taste of another’s mouth.   
  
He dreams of blood, and then he dreams of dirt, and he wakes clawing for air, clawing through nothing, like he’s clawing out of a grave again. A grave that’s not his own because he’s not that person anymore. It’s weird, a place of death to be a place of birth, but that’s the way it is. He wakes gnawing on his nails, the tips of his fingers throbbing echoes of pain.   
  
Blood and dirt. Sweat and tears. Laughing and crying, until his world is a drowning haze of scent and taste. He smiles through it, because they taught him how to smile first, and the rest comes after. Frowning and sneering and smirking and scowling, he defaults to a smile because it’s the easiest trick in the world.   
  
You’re not a threat if you’re smiling.   
  
He eats to prove he can. He drinks because why not. He dances because life is short, or maybe his life is short, and the blood on his teeth is the blood of a past he doesn’t own. He tries to leave the world behind him better, but people are awful, and people are cruel, and sometimes, it’s easier to take that cruelty and give it back.   
  
But he tries. He tries and tries.   
  
And goes to sleep in blood, and opens his eyes to dirt.   
  
The ice comes and chills him to the blood.   
  
The holy glow comes and pretends to make him clean.   
  
He speaks in a language he instinctively knows, and he remembers things he never learned. They give him a name that’s not his name, but it becomes his name when he takes it. He stumbles into a few more names, but they are not his, so he rejects them.   
  
He surrounds himself with other strangers, people with secrets and names which aren’t theirs. One of them wakes up choking on saltwater, and he thinks, ah, this one’s like me. This one’s living a life that’s not his.   
  
Another one dreams of blood, and vanishes with a storm. She carries regret like a mantle about her, and they are two peas in a pod. She tries to forget, and he doesn’t want to remember, because it doesn’t matter. She makes him feel like he belongs, and she’s home, and it’s nice to think he has one.   
  
He still dreams of death and wakes with dirt on his lips. He runs far from the life that isn’t his, but feels like he’s running faster toward a different grave.   
  
It’s better, and it’s worse, when he blinks and looks up into the eyes of a monster, up the length of a blood-stained blade. There’s hate in his mouth, and there’s dirt in his face, and blood smeared on his teeth.   
  
And that crazy son of a bitch smirks down at him like victory is inevitable.   
  
It’s nowhere he hasn’t been before. He spits “fuck you,” and he tries to laugh, but he chokes on a gurgle of blood, and the glaive twists and twists and twists.   
  
He dreams with his eyes open. He dreams of blood and dirt, falling over him, a rolling tide of mud and earth and churned up flowers. It’s a chilly bed, a blanket of rock and ice and snow. He goes to sleep with dirt in his mouth, and it’s just weird enough to give him pause.   
  
Maybe this time, he’ll wake up to blood.   
  
If he wakes at all.   
  


*


End file.
